The Great Houses of Morrowind | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #29

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge ma but this is the elder scrolls podcast i'm scott here with michael and drew as always and today we are talking all about the great houses of morrowind so where do we want to start let's pick one of the five because we're gonna sort of touch on the sixth house a little bit later we might have to do that in an individual video because there's a lot of metaphysical cool stuff with that going on with dagother so which of the five what would we start a good like tiny little preface to to put in there i guess you could say is that this kind of wasn't you know the great house structure was kind of unique to morrowind in that when you know the kind of people the changed ones made their exodus across all the you know all the way from somerset to morrowind they were following free date the good daedra boefia azura and mafala and um you know largely because of mafala's sphere of kind of like the web of intricate you know plots going on over here all of this stuff like that it kind of um they showed them how to structure their society in a much different way which is what led to these five six great houses but although if you think about it it's not crazy different to another province in the sense of you know there's a bunch of factions and they all form together to have a kind of overarching council that rules things and as we know they're also very uh i guess easy to be corrupted like any other province government one thing too we don't actually get like an exact formulation because they obviously say like the good daedra taught them the ways to structure things but at the same time the kaima came across into what they call resident which is um modern-day morrowind and they had a period called like high-velocity culture where they were basically and that's when you see those like daedric ruins and stuff in morrowind like these were the um places that they had their establishments and so on and then they would start um at one point they had sort of like a degradation of their society and so on and then they ended up kind of you know whittling down into sort of like an ashland estate like a lot of the ancient china around the time of nerevar's rise and the nordic conquests and stuff like that they were living much closer to the ashlanders that by comparison to like modern dunmer kind of things yeah like they're like more tribes that they became these big houses and civilizations with very distinct cultures from one another and like the houses to uh there are lots of houses the great houses are simply just the houses that got the most power and influence and that are sort of the dominant ones like there are plenty like you know like house morrow or house yeah you even had the house dwemer you know where they kind of like extended that as a branch so that they could improve their relations with the underground dwellers who kind of preceded them yeah and we know that house address we don't know much about them at all but we know that they're one of the um great houses now well they replaced who were obviously they were very you know they were um sympathetic to the imperial cosmopolitan ideals and you know when when things went kind of bad in the in the fourth era um their anti-imperial sentiment was high that's you know ended up biting them in the ass and they got replaced yeah and you can imagine that like it's it's easy like everyone wants to pin their problems on someone and i mean house slalom did cause a lot of problems and it you know it's the perfect scapegoat really well the big thing is like yeah they just under like instead of all of the houses like standing you know again against the imperial sort of thing the halal were the most open to it and they were taking constant advantages of working with the times with the imperials rather than the rest who were like you know some of the more fundamental houses like indora was so powerful that even when they did get whittled down a bit in the third era they still remained you know had a lot of power but um house uh dress particularly also lost a bunch of power because a lot of house dresses sort of traditional kind of um riots and so on were you know helped being preserved by house indoril but when house you know basically when the empire came along and then they signed the armistice and they agreed to be part of the empire a whole bunch of house indril's highest officials offed themselves and committed suicide because um you know it was shameful and they would never want to live under under the empire's uh thumb and then so therefore house dress kind of lost a bunch of their greatest supporters and so on because you know the they were left with the interiors they're a little bit more i guess uh i guess that's kind of interesting about lalu is that you can kind of view them as being you know kind of a more basic house compared to some of the others but really they were they were pretty much the only ones with any real progressive values and it obviously put them at odds with a lot like especially with house dress because you know they have a financial reason you know they have all their plantations and slaves and they have a good reason to not want to embrace any change and then you've got house slalom who eventually you know you've got a dunmer king who outlaws slavery which is a pretty big deal you know that's going pretty far into the timeline but yeah a lot of their a lot of their plantations relied on that slavery obviously you know we can say it's a bad thing or whatever but they're not economically viable anymore so when and harlow they even gave kind of like um not territory to the empire but kind they were very hospitable like they just let them kind of like yeah well the biggest thing post up in there they're like examples of like balmoral as a house rhetoric thing and then it gets taken by lalu and they basically like lalo was on these massive territory grabs and so on because they had the um support of the empire and they had like um i'm pretty sure it's hilal that dominates the ebony trade and then there was like they were just able to massage themselves into this position where they were benefiting and that's the biggest problem i think from the view of the other uh dunmer houses is that they look at lalu like these sneaky little traders because klalu if they could would have just kept all of the you know all of the slavery all of their own values everything they wanted but um they you know sneakily just used they just basically like it's kind of like pretending to be like progressive and so on in that kind of sense so they would just they basically just didn't have any values they were just flexible with whatever benefits them the most you know what i mean yeah they if you if you go and you look at um the law behind what they actually got they actually used the empire to get favors and got awarded like all these rich ebony mines yeah well not only that like things like this and and fertile lands where they could so i guess it might be important to just tell people that lack to so they can probably understand morrowind's structure so so let's talk about it all post nerevar and so on when there's the sort of great houses system and everything and then bring them up to speed so generally there were so there were these great houses and there's sort of a council of big council that has members from all of the highest members of the great of the great houses and they come together and they sort of talk about things and so on but then you also have the tribunal which is above them which are like you know the three tribunal gods and they've obviously like you know they're a borderline that they kind of are a theocracy really like the you know the gods and the priests cast rule everything but what happened is when they were basically um forced into the armistice with the empire uh tiber septim introduced uh like basically an imperial monarchy which is a separate separate sort of um power in um it's basically like a a representative of imperial and um dunmer like kind of uh alliance i guess so they started off like one of the first examples is um baron zaya who was made like you know like the queen of mournhold kind of thing and then she and you know there was stuff going on there because basically he if you look at baron's eyes story tiber septim sort of pulled her away from destruction and and then sort of groomed her into becoming this kind of um basically yeah queen for born hold you so you established a sort of dynasty and there were like examples of duke like uh uh it's the things of adam dren who was like who was a house lily member and he became the duke of mor um duke of mournhold and then you had like obviously baron's eyes child with um sumatras who was one of who was a dark elf but a general um of tiber septim's army married baron zaya and they had a kid together and that kid was hell seth who was king hell south of morrowind so they had this so the imperials were kind of like slowly trying to um put out their uh like control it by creating a creating a monarchy and you know lalu was very accommodating so this monarchy was basically made up of haalu members so you know everyone else didn't like this the parent the power balance was slightly being you know fed towards hilalu over the last 400 years in the third era so um but then yeah so then that's a lot of the reason you have that um animosity between the houses i mean i'll give you i'll give you a quote from like a kind of hulu teaching that really sums them up well although in some ways you could say they destroyed their reputation and it didn't sticks what they wanted but it says in the great wind of progress tradition cannot stand grasp fortune by the forelocks when you see your chances seize them when you see a chance to turn a profit take it but do not follow money blindly there is value in reputation more than many young hwalu realize this value must be carefully balanced against the more tangible coins in any deal theft and murder are bad for business you can steal from someone but will he trade with you after that you can't bargain with a dead man so they seem very like pragmatic and basically like the ultimate sellouts in the sense that like their main goal is just like being prosperous and making money and throwing tradition away because they believe it can't stand anyway so they don't care about it yeah um but obviously they got a very bad reputation by the end of it but you know they had their big reign with lots of powers that's things that you know they're about like it's taking measured risks but kind of like risks that go out of the norm that would be accepted so you know when things do go bad they're going to be the ones who get the spotlight especially you know because it at the end of the day it's like it's it's terrible timing because you have the tribunal disappear shortly before some major catastrophes you know with it with a um an oblivion crisis and you've got um red mountain erupting um so when that happens and you had all of the imperials just completely pull out of your province and not age you in your you know in your time of need you know you know exactly who you're gonna you know um punish for it it's interesting that they're actually um just i guess we can continue and we'll we'll start talking about hell out how slowly because we've already sort of started on it but one of the biggest hypocrisies of them is so they'll like have really close ties with the east empire trading company imperial stuff we know that and then they've actually one of the only houses with like senior members being non-dunma so they started introducing like you know they're opening their house to to the more cosmopolitan values and so on but at the same time they've got really close connections with the komodo tong which are the most like xenophobic criminal organization in they're in fact um the leader of the commander tong in the time of morrow in the game is the brother of duke vadim dren who is he was a you know high-ranking lalu member and duke of mournhold and obviously all for imperialization it's just fun to see that kind of like conflict and kind of like they don't have any you know obviously they'll be that's on a greater scale like not talking about each individual like obviously some individuals truly think it's good or bad or whatnot but it just you know what i mean like people look outsiders looking in would be like you're just the biggest hypocrites like just doing whatever benefits whatever fills the coin purse basically yeah exactly so you know i think that's going to be a common problem where power resides isn't it we're going to see a lot of this yeah yeah but the problem as well with that is when you have that focus that's kind of i don't know if i'd say anti-tradition but just like you know less care for it you do end up with just less morality in general so it's like well this member of house lalu will go behind the back of this one if it benefits them and they won't get caught it just i know other houses can be like that but it just creates an environment kind of where that can happen in a way it's kind of it's picking the picking the winning side as well because you know for for a great part of history um you can imagine most of the dumber people would look at their um their demigod tribunal as just like you know they're unassailable you can't you can't go against them they're they're you know they're all powerful and then you've got tiber septim come along and kind of you know like they tub scepting doesn't conquer morrowind but kind of you know he also doesn't get completely sent away with his tail between his legs avery she really you know shows himself to have some strength and they kind of come to agreement so it's like you know he's almost on par with them to an extent and you can see why claudia would be like oh it could be very beneficial to kind of get in this guy's good books yeah and like um i i do like also how but if you think about them in the fourth era and where the lalu continue to go they keep sour like they um in raven rock they try and like you know um perform coups against house radaran and so on and they're still trying to like you know dig their dig their hands in because they're not a great house anymore on like the big grand council thing because house address replaced them but still they're around like they exist in some capacity well they try to pull off an assassination don't yeah i mean you know salty but yeah i the salty house halalu is uh yeah even if you think about them from the gameplay perspective out of house radaran um and uh talvani and haalu lalu feels the sort of like thief assassin archetype anyway and read around the warrior archetype telvani mage like so yeah well that's what i quite like about house red around is that they they're kind of just consistently no nonsense and have you know they managed to even when times they get looking rough they're you know things don't fall apart and they kind of come together and actually sort out which is which is kind of refreshing but red around again yeah yeah because even even house televani aren't really like that you know it is kind of unique to rhetoron in the sense that they do care about you yeah we'll tell vanity telvani are very like you know they they work together but it's very much i just like them the most like pious houses the most ones that benefited the most and enjoyed um the the theocracy there under the tribunal it's definitely um in house cinderell and um house rhetoric and i think house rhetoric and also i guess we could start talking which one indirectly hit red around first should we do let's go red i feel like indoril is going to be a bigger one so okay perhaps we'll get on to that one after so rhetorian of like historically um they've had this sort of western border with skyrim and all the land around there and they've been kind of like treated as the sort of stalwart um defenders of um of of morrowind because they're just in these seasoned warriors they're constantly fighting off nordic invasions and raids and stuff throughout their history and they've kind of formed like i guess the backbone of of um the military and so on and you'll even see them in like you can see the sort of like they quite they took quite a liking to vivec in the way that vivek had professed a lot of like um chivalry and like sort of nightly values and um a lot of rhetorian members actually make up a majority of the buoyant armages which is vivec's personal own um like nights order of nights essentially and yeah a lot of them you know rhetorian um along with in drill put a lot towards the ghost fence and sort of like the kind of like the dunmer greater good like you can tell like their their whole like you know you can look at their code the things like you know duty piety and gravity and like taking taking things very serious you know they're not like you know jokesters it's a fairly consistent theme i think like in the elder scrolls in general that location and geography kind of impacts the the race or the culture that develops there and you know like um if you looked if you look around mournhold kind of central morrowind it's you know it's not the most hospitable place in tamriel but it's you know it's quite a nice area and when you look at like marines dagon being a corner of the house of troubles who's you know he's he's the environmental problems and um house red around for for a lot of their area as you said kind of like they're constantly in conflict with the nords um in the lofty mountains but then they've just got really some very inhospitable frozen sections that you wouldn't think about when it comes to morrowind but it's you know bordering skyrim so it's very harsh and cold there yeah and i love the line a light careless life is not worth living like i do like them sort of and you can imagine them looking down on things like cla lou and and to be honest i can there's it's not like all of the houses get along entirely like to i'm sure they would look at a lot of the um you know sort of luxury and stuff of house indoril um and and the riches and and stuff of the of the temple and sort of you know look down on it a bit because they're not you and i mean it's yeah they don't they they are they're like a a modest house and they like to design things seriously but simply you know it's even reflected in their architecture style it's you know built from local materials and kind of just like nothing too fancy yeah they've got some it's it's it's pragmatic it's sensible it's sturdy it works but they won't go beyond that to make it all crazy decorative and like over the top and i i really like like a bunch of their bone mold armor is really cool and like the red around watchman helm and stuff like that like i mean if you looked like that and had that armor and you can consider that sensible and not over the top why would you want to go beyond it yeah do you really need to make it gold-plated it's pretty cool already yeah but like house so i don't know what else to um because house for rhetoric is the most easily understood one for sure um yeah they're probably my favorite if i if i had to pick a favorite it would be them or tell i mean televani's really cool sometimes you can forget how cool they are and take them for granted but i i don't know i just like the in a province that's filled with so much like um backstabbing and questionable things it's nice to have that consistent house who stays true to who they are and they're kind of like the good guys i was just gonna say like the the mod tamriel rebuilt if you know if you've got morrowind and you you're interested in modding it absolutely download that mod because they do flesh out a large part of the um the west side of morrowind um and if you look at blacklight there you know capital city it's it's so beautiful it's like if that's what it does look like in the law and you know if it's ever shown officially i hope it looks something like that because it looks amazing yeah yeah but they're um i i do i do like red around a lot but i feel like i just the other ones have more like zing fact because it's very like you know it's they're all like very uh admirable values and so on but they're pretty straightforward a lot of their architecture and like aesthetics are cool but also their symbol they're like crest is awesome but um yeah would you want to move to indore now or you want to like yeah i mean is kind of televani in there indireal is kind of important anyway so we should kind of like talk about it so i mean that that all starts a house indoor was like a thing before like you know nerevar marries into marrying um almalexia so um and becoming indore nerva and obviously like you know the ordinators are almost you know synonymous like basically all indoril and they have the visage of their greatest hero indore nerevar on their face and they are the most closely linked temple with uh uh sorry most closely linked house with the temple the tribunal temple and if you it's it's a funny like i pointed this out in the ordinator video but it's a funny um irony when you kind of bake basically to what is the truth of the tribunal that they betrayed nerevar and and you know stole power and so on but because of the doctrine and story that they've spun and they've even like you know honored nerevar and honor him through all of these you know tales and stories and and motifs and stuff like that that all of these ordinators are walking around wearing nerevar's face protecting gods that they that betrayed nerevar in the first place you know what i mean but obviously they don't know that this is stuff that just gets carried on in ashland and myth and and they're predominantly very much the religious house yeah like if you had to pick a religious house this is it and we were talking about before and i guess we should just bring it up for everyone this kind of idea that they're always involved with whatever the religion is so when everyone's really just all focusing on the good daedra and and you know that's the main focus of society they're all about that right but then obviously they come to review the tribunal they're the tribunals well i think it's smart weren't they because i think they um you know everyone worshipped the good daedra but the tribunal knew they couldn't just come in and replace them which is kind of why you get the idea of the anticipations right it's because you know there's no tribunal without the good daedra the good daedra led to this so this is just the natural next step you know um so it really it preys upon everybody's love for the good danger well it yeah and and this this takes place over a very long time too so like it's so it's not like this they're like you know doing some kind of flip it's more just like a slow adaption into the next yeah well like for for them like i don't think originally like pre-tribunal that that indirel was necessarily the like hyper religious like everyone was very like religious and all for the the good day thing but everything happens as a natural progression so you know once you know they're all into following indore nerevar obviously he becomes the center point of this new religion and it's kind of like you know the tribunal coming and becoming gods is like the coming of christ it's sort of like the you know um like you've said before drew the it's like the new testament to the old testament you know all of the good daedra were positioned as the anticipations these sort of like crueler ancestral forms of um of the golden age tribunal that are to come like more civilized gods they're going to bring them into a new age and that's what really intertwines in indirel with them but if we just go all the way fast forward to the collapse of the tribunal and when they cried as the false um emperor as a sort of bid to hold on to as much power as they as they kind of had that because the house had lost so much power with the tribunal they kind of really did become synonymous with um the the new temple like of the faith so now they they don't a lot of their you know they say to join the templars to join in drill and that's what one of the priests say in um in raven rock but it's it's like i think it's like a bit of a natural a coping mechanism to hold on to that you can see a lot of parallels um to christianity because you know you have this idea that um nerevar um you know the the great houses can elect a hortator to kind of lead them in times of need and um you know nerevar steps into this position he becomes you know azura's like chosen one basically and you know when when he sacrifices himself even though you know he was kind of um brutally murdered um you know the the tribunal even though they were responsible for it they were they they were kind of like judas um they essentially became his disciples and like you know they were spreading that good word onwards and then you know ascending as they did so and it's hard to deny them at that point it's what makes really good world building when you can look at it and you can go like there's a lot of like hindu bits in there and trappings and stuff like that but there is a lot of like abramix sort of judaism sort of stories and themes in there like if you read the 36 lessons of vivec like you basically have sort of like the hortator like so in nerevar in the sense and obviously any future nerevarine kind of thing that's going to come and rise to that position but it's sort of like the the jesus kind of element like the prophet and then and you've kind of got like the sharma as like this this devil figure this satan and so on this whole time so you've kind of got this like you know biblical opposition and so on and don't worry you know and you know the nerve ring prophecy like you know he's going to come again um hortador and defeat the shah mat and you know what i mean and like there's a lot of biblical sort of elements in there and then you also like factor in that they have like a whole catalogue's a funny word for it but of saints like a lot of saints like but there's all of these different saints that they have like there's a lot of there's a weird mixture of of things it's like quite alien but then there's all of the sort of um you know traditional kind of european things to latch on to like nightly orders and saints and stuff like that and it's just a really cool mix but um i guess we'll so indore was like super powerful basically like they were the most dominant house for for pretty much forever right up until the end and that served and that served a lot of other houses in terms of just like promoting dunma culture in the in dunmer ways especially against haalu's kind of like you know desire for more imperial culture yeah absolutely because and as we said at the start obviously in doral is a big help to dress yeah and so within doral you know past its glory days dress is going to be in a lot of trouble as well yeah and so like and that's the other thing like you talk about like i guess because everyone no matter what i think it you can see especially across all like fictional characters and everything no matter the culture really you can kind of everyone kind of gets this sense of there's there's an adorable admirable um something to admire about them is that they they sort of like stick to their values or their guns it's kind of when you see the samurai like committing suicide the supuku stuff and and like that's kind of like a not my flavor i don't want to do that but you can see how it's like a very honorable like conviction is a very like um it's kind of like a beautiful thing like it can i mean it can be a destructive thing but it's so when you see in in i really do like the story of like the higher up members of um indirel actually like sticking to their guns and they're like i'm not going to live in this you know they felt betrayed by the tribunal i'm not going to live in this morrowind under under tiber septim and then they all kill themselves but i like how that you know had uh carry-on effects and changed the um the the politics because now you don't have all of these like hyper conservative members of yeah i mean ultimately it's super bad for the house like as much as i mean you could argue that the house is kind of like screwed anyway and that they're not gonna so and they know that which is why they choose to uh you know not stick around but yeah the ones that left would be the weaker willed ones or just a lot of them not maybe not all of them maybe some were really like um had strong convictions but just knew that like you know leaving is just not going to help yeah you can see how this kind of becomes just a giant melting pot of problems that allows the argonian invasion to be so successful up until they hit red around you know it's just um so many things going wrong for them on so many fronts and you know their most powerful house kind of you know self-destructing when they lose their you know their gods yeah because um yeah even how stress loses a lot of land and stuff because of that if you actually like because in the fourth era we don't know as much we can only get like hearsay from raven rock stuff like that but they seem to be like the dominant great house in the future which is in which half rhetoric yeah because dresses are like right on the front lines aren't they so you know and they're not only that but they're probably the biggest target for all the argonian anger too so oh absolutely and the most convenient target because they're right down there and i mean that's why they were also successful when they were down there because it was very convenient for them to go to the border of black marsh to take argonian slaves yeah but you know yeah on the opposite end of that you're you're first in line when the argonians tear through morrowind and stuff and they're bolstering their numbers as they liberate each like plantation you know with a bunch of new slaves i've said this plenty of plenty of times before but i'm just like how could they have not conquered all of my like the things they had working for them they had there's there's basically a volcano apocalypse you've a loss of loss of gods completely weakened um all around because of the oblivion crisis as well and then it's kind of like they still get stopped by just house rhetoric i know house rhetorians like you know the backbone of the military and they're strong but the fact that they couldn't get past the south is still do you know what i mean like and yeah go yeah i was gonna say go look up my video argonians week where i basically go through all of their military efforts throughout the timeline and kind of you know i mean you you all know i like argonians but they kind of do fail time at the end of the day too is like the virtue of like of of a people or something is not necessarily always in their ability to conquer and conquest so it's not like um going oh that makes them yeah it's like oh they're bad because they suck at conquesting morrowind and it's like it's just that because of that one daedra line that they um seem to be like everyone's like oh they're like the most powerful race and so on and i really feel like it's just not the case well we have speculated before and it makes a lot of sense that they're just the further they get from the heart of black marsh the weaker they become and the less capable they are of adapting and that you know they don't have connection to their overseers and um yeah it doesn't surprise me that they would have been stopped honestly and and i mean even if you look at the kind of when you're getting into the north and you've got vardenfell and you've got all the uh the televani controlled regions i feel like that you know that they'd struggle a fair bit to deal with with these houses what's fun i mean it is it is sad for an argonian that if you think about it you finally liberate you know your brothers and sisters from slavery but at the end of the day you're kind of a slave to the hist like you just can't you can't escape this label yeah the um house till vani also got uh copped a bit because originally before the dlc's came out the only hint to telvani was um if you go to i think it's a brand shay you go do that quest for him in rift and you get a book you find a book for him and you find out that it reveals his past on this crashed ship that he was like an escaped tell by anything and it was sort of implying that the house was destroyed was he on the pride of telstra yeah i'm pretty sure he was not he wasn't what the book was that you go there to get it you read it and it's basically giving something long lines of like you know one of the last like escaped house talvani things but then obviously when you get to raven rock you see nell off there and it's like you know televani's like you know they're alive and well but obviously smaller but like if you really think about it like if you go through all of the modern houses you've got um okay hello has gone replaced by saddress but that also just by being a newcomer i sort of assume they have a lower level of power dressers had their territory just walked all over but then again it's been like over well over 150 years since argonian um in the agony invasion like this is a long period of time for it to happen but isn't there some quote about them still patrolling around and stuff i'm not sure how far like that goes forward into the future though like i'm sure they're still like attacking doing things at the bottom i know that they assaulted raven rock at some point earlier in the history i'll you have to find it but like the um but then you've also got house cinderella which is basically withered and kind of just become the temple so they've just the reclamation's temple is almost just house cinderell so they don't really have the same power they used to telvani obviously has has shrunken and so on so the only real big power there is right around left like there is no one else to really compete with them like maybe their whole their hey look it's uh evolution like they they've always focused on being hardy and sort of duty honor and you know weathered the storm i weathered the storm sorry and um and all the other houses have fallen except well you know into you know weaker positions yeah well they've had countless centuries of dealing with the nords in the height of the mountains and now they've got kind of like fairly disorganized argonians roaming around and i imagine that much of central and southern morrowind is potentially even still contested ground but i i highly doubt the borders will the borders of morrowind and black marsh will change drastically because you know at some point um the strength will kind of um they'll galvanize and kind of push back and eventually i imagine that the argonians will settle to kind of retreat to where it's swampy and where other armies really struggle to to infiltrate you know i feel like that's inevitable i mean argonians aren't really like um conquest based anyway they've never been the type to like swarm into a new territory in what build there i mean the whole modern argonian philosophy anyway it's not supported to build architecture based out of morrowind's um like environment well that like if if argonians were like oh we're going to live in you know mud huts and reed houses what do you you know like it's just their whole i feel like they're just there yeah like their whole core religious philosophy anyway is really like live in the present don't fear erasure in the future and you know and stuff like that but that's why i think it's the um anzalil um political parties sort of gained power and that sort of seemed like that was the kind of like you know galvanization to get them to go up there and like get revenge and attack whereas i don't feel like that um because it's funny because like they actually had just outlawed slavery like a couple of years prior yeah but that didn't actually stop at all what do you mean no no of course it's not gonna stop at all but i'm just saying it's like the the i guess the worst time for revenge it's like they finally it finally did like hell seth outlaw um the rumors are from oblivion that hellseth outlawed slavery so slavery's outlawed the time of oblivion and then you've got like i think it's like five years and they because the argument invasion just happens after red mountain it's about five six years or something so in about five or six years of like slavery being outlawed and peeled back they just go on in yeah although i guess in a sense whether or not they considered it um with hulu kind of being kicked out of the uh the great houses that the the abolition of slavery i don't think would last too long in a prospering morrowind without hulu i feel like it wouldn't take long and i mean they don't follow it anyway like till vanity's not gonna follow it like maybe dress would televany would just be like no i to be honest i have a feeling like i've got mixed things like this is something that's weird it's still a point of like okay i haven't seen any like strong strong evidence for either way but like some people sort of treat morrowind as if it's still part of the empire but i really don't think it is like the whole dlc dragonborn kind of gives you the impression that it's not but in that sort of same way like they don't have a king or um anymore like an imperialized sort of monarchy or anything so i kind of like you know mournhold was just destroyed so i'm sort of like i don't really um i don't i don't think they're being ruled by the empire and therefore i feel like they'll get back to some more traditional roots and i feel like that's the way it's going just with the reclamations and the resurgence of the good daedra like there would be people would be looking back like they'll be looking back beyond the the false gods and so on and really getting like you know and especially you know how like in times of crisis people really do tend towards um religion more because you know it helps yeah and a tradition traditionalist parties usually go well sorry it's like we i said traditionalist parties tend to go well it's kind of like we need to return to our roots because that's what made us great in the first place yeah and as straying from that is what caused ourselves especially when you think you know that they they were kind of founded on berefius teachings of kind of like overcoming the the tests you know you've got the the house of troubles that are like the embodiments of tests they have to deal with and they're being tested at the moment so it you know that that's when they should theoretically thrive is is in a time like now is just to come back hard and yeah like come back with the good daedra not with any progressive values but exactly what the daedra said thousands of years ago yeah but then so i was going to say on the other side we don't know just how weakened morrowind is like we're not aware of the full state of things like how like what does it look like how ash covered and just destroyed and like downtrodden we can see that red mountain is still fuming so i can you could kind of imagine that vardenfell at least would sort of just be constantly having like those same ash storms that you experience in in morrowind the game but like kind of all the time but whereas like there's probably other areas are probably fine like it's obviously not going to be the same as if it just blew up because it's been you know nearly 200 years like it's been like 194 or something years like that since um it exploded and also the argonian invasion happened soon after that so like morrowind has had you know over a hundred years to recover you know even if all of the damage things really sort of you know carried on for say you know right up until like year 80 of the fourth era or something it had all of this other time look here's the thing that's true and like that is a long time to heal like if you go look at like you know societies that get destroyed and annihilated that is a long time to recover but the way skyrim's written makes it all feel so recent and even not besides just the refugee crisis in windhelm and how like you reflect and you're like wait they've been here for like a hundred years and they still kind of you know yeah the nords and the dunmer haven't integrated there's still like this big criminal like community and like there's still heaps of tensions and problems but then when you go to soulstime it just feels very recent you know like i think the b the kind of gave themselves the biggest most beneficial retcon to skyrim storyline would be like putting it setting it like you know 30 years after oblivion instead of 200 because then you could just have all of these events sort of happen they feel like more tangible and you can see the ripple effects of these things without thinking that like oh it's been 200 years it's like too long do you want to know that's kind of the thing with the elder scrolls timeline in general is there are so many points in history you know much more egregious examples where you can see just hundreds almost thousands of years past with kind of nothing really going on and no major changes it's almost like you know the way things advance and progress in this universe is just nothing like it is for us i think i said on twitter or something you could take like the nearly 3 000 years of of the first era and condense it to about 1400 years and it would still still have that sense of like pace like i think it all comes from like a lot of like roots in fantasy is like lord of the rings has this massive timeline it's huge and it's thousands of years go by and characters live for all of these thousands of years but if you wanted to like to feel more like close to to realism is like things change really quick like look at the last 100 years it's kind of like how like uh you know like the the age of knights in full plate armor and gleaming and so on like that kind of lasted for a hundred years and then guns came about was gone so that was like a hundred years of you know technology but what i'm saying is even if you apply this to a fantasy sort of mentality you could like double the amount of time triple the amount of time and it's still such a shorter timeline by comparison to to elder scrolls or yeah i think yeah i mean i yeah yeah it's just it's just a cool um little thing i think you'd you know i was gonna say i was gonna say in elder scrolls six one of the good things about leaving a timeline open is that they can write books just about historical things that you've never heard of and date them in that timeline where there's space like i still agree that they they definitely could condense it right like absolutely could condense it but it is nice that there is space there so you can pick up a book and it's obviously not going to be something super world changing otherwise you'd be like why haven't i heard of this yet but you can just read a book about some battle or some skirmish or some war between two kind of like not provinces but like um districts or like two small territories that each had leaders you know back in some certain time period fighting in whatever province and it would be cool and they can just leave those little gaps yeah yeah i don't mean but um yeah so let's get back on track with the houses i guess we'll go to house dress yeah like to just kind of give them a bit of a focus before we move to televani so um house dress uh massive salt rice plantations they are they're a big so they're a massive fans of slavery they're staunch defenders of slavery because it's their main labor force they basically capture argonians and because argonians have like you know all different resistances they're very adaptable um they use them in these massive you know salt rice fields and also like you you know use them in mines where potential like you know toxic noxious gases and and stuff like it there that they can survive like they they they're not um and it's not just a pragmatic thing or a financial thing like they're also extremely xenophobic so how stressed they consider the dhanma to be above you know the other races i mean we should i mean a lot of dark elves do but they really because we should throw us a disclaimer strongly believe that dunmer are like one of the most xenophobic races like period across all of them so it's like like but of that of that i just know like there's this there's this um quote from understanding how stress and it's like the isolationist stance of how stress was instilled in its customs and world outlook from the very beginning not only do we consider the other cultures and races to be inferior to the dunmer we deem any extended contact with them where we were not in total control to present a danger to dunmer society ideas like a plague can spread without warning and prove to be impossible to contain instead we should concentrate on inter-house relations and improving the position of the dharma to make our society stronger and eternal so you can really feel that like traditional like i don't even want ideas from other races i would say that that's probably the same like just extrapolating it's probably the same as um house indoor for example just based on and you could even extend it to uh rhetorian to a degree just because like india like by virtue of being a theocracy you're like everything's dogmatic like you've got these gods and these gods that can enforce it and so on so it's all really rigid like no no heresy you know like everything that's not then why do you why do you think how stress would label themselves as that then they must have some i mean stronger or what is it a competition like i'm the most xenophobia no i think it's just like if you read it it read like it just reads like it's their philosophy which just matches up with some of the other houses like like indoril for example i think rhetorian may be a little less so but even if you think about red around like their dedication to clan family and duty and gravity and stuff like that seems like a much more um and you know obviously they're more entrenched with entrenched with the tribunal as well it's kind of a beautiful thing about the dunmer is that they really they don't discriminate that you know they'll enslave just about everyone you know it's like they mainly slave our enslave argonians because it's easy khajiit perhaps the next easiest and perhaps they put them at the bottom but they'll enslave humans as well you know you can find them in slave pens um you know um in television territory a lot and so slave tiles i'm pretty sure even wood elves like this yeah just anything goes like they really see themselves as like the only like you know out of the elven races as well like obviously by the way like this is a generalization of like times of their society and so on like there's always going to be individuals that are against a four because yeah like the twin lamps and all the other abolitionists yeah but even those kinds of abolitionist kind of groups they would not have existed before the armistice you know before um the empire has any control like looking beforehand it's i mean i know eso put them in this and like this is where we get to the whole urban heart packed kind of stuff where only a few of the houses join but then it's kind of look i don't i i still to this day think that the evan hart pact is like poorly done just because you have to take um the law added i don't just mean elder scrolls online in general but specifically morrow and i think you have to take it with a grain of salt and perhaps even in somerset because realistically say you've you've world built a very xenophobic race who don't they consider anyone who comes in outlanders and kind of give them side eyes and whatnot you can't make that work for your game if you have an mmo rpg it's like it's not pos so you kind of you know you take everything with suspending your disbelief a little bit and i think the ebonheart pact is kind of an example of that it just annoys me because they could have had an mmo without doing that that that's such a mess and i know it's only a few houses but i just i just don't buy it that these be long-standing thousand long-year theocracy tribunal gods they can defend themselves no one can conquer them the riemann empire couldn't even do it after trying for 80 years it's just sort of like then all of a sudden they're like actually we'll work with um our you know our greatest enemies and our slaves you know what i mean and like work with them like it just kind of sounds silly to me and i know it's only eastern skyrim too but i mean eastern skyrim if anything's the more like uh conservative side of skyrim yeah yeah and the one they've had fights with and yeah it just and i know they go oh before the pack there's all these reasons but what i'm saying they're all cope reasons they're all it's like all that happened was they could make sense with the elder mary dominion they could make sense with um high rock um to a degree like even the way they wrote in the orcs into that kind of thing it was like a real um i actually like how they did that because it was a very temporary thing just to get to that uh hiking america was leveraging to get um orcs to help him so then he'd set them up with orcidium and like you know it was a mutually beneficial kind of thing and also that pact you know falls apart with the death of kurog but um in the ebonheart pact sort of scenario i just i just it's it's just they they're so ideologically opposed and they're basically just like oh we're going to mash the other three races together somehow you know and it's like unlikely alliance but i'm like yeah it is very very unlikely like two i'm like do you think they could have done it differently do you think you could match i mean the whole system is flawed anyway but if i just you know a little fun challenge i'm gonna force you to use their parameters and you have to make three alliances you know each one with different races how would you do it that makes i mean i don't like the alliance that i don't like the story like that anyway like i just the me too i'm saying if you had to use their parameters you can see how they were forced into it yeah i think you could split them up differently like why couldn't you do like a more yeah that's what i'm asking let's do it so i mean you could go because the old merry dominion one makes a lot of sense the old merry dominion but even that to be honest though but the khajiit thing like it's even going back but like it doesn't necessarily make like you know they did it because of the where the khajiit are in on the admiral dominion in the future but the aldmeri dominion khajiit thing is very specific like they made the moons disappear and they sort of rebuilt the kingdoms and took them on as client states kind of thing but if you went um back like you can get away with it it's still not the most ideal but i like i don't know even like um i don't have khajiit nargonians because it just literally the fact is some are not meant to be in alliances in together exactly but that's why i think that whole premise was they just did it for pvp yeah yeah i i i premise was a bit awkward because you know it all kind of it did force you as well if you wanted to play with i think if you wanted to play with certain friends you had to be a specific race or a group of races in each pact or whatever i think it might be originally originally but i mean like you know one thing that could it could work but at the same time i'm not a game dev but it's like you know you could potentially do you know high rock skyrim and cyrodiil versus um valenwood somerset and elsewhere and then you have the other three races as kind of independent factions i don't know but then you know then i'm not sure exactly how that worked but i think the orcs being on their own you could have all kinds of kinds of yeah you could you could have all kinds of things it's just yeah they wanted the biggest like throw in even things was that just in terms of like morrowind's growth like by the time you get to the armistice and so on it's supposed to be like you know how cinderella are all committing suicide after they would never do all of these kinds of things and interact with all these other races and have them have any degree of power but by virtue of being the ebonheart pact the others are sort of they're exerting a sort of power a sort of cooperation over other houses and like why weren't they offing themselves when um when they made that alliance with with uh the nords and so on and yeah the same way it just it just doesn't stack up and it's like the reason is also it's like the why like there's a very good reason why they signed the armistice it's because degother had cut them off from the source the heart of lorcan so their powers were waning and they saw that oh we might not be able to beat the empire so let's actually make a favorable alliance now and you know they saw that tiber septim was basically going to win so they just played their cards right at the time but there was a reason for that you know but when it came to riemann and now sitting there fully powered um they were like they kept on trying to knock him back and you know what i mean yeah well i think we could probably move to house television i'm kind of keen to i guess you know one way to link the two topics is i guess they at least kind of threw us a bone by having telvani be the one house who were like they look at the eben heart packed and like nah we're not interested you know much of the much to the chagrin of the other houses um and that you know that is a good way to in a sense sum them up that they wanted no part of that crap yeah yeah but then yeah i just i just start feeling like the same way as scott now or i'm like well why would they saw that absolutely like they should also do that just silly anyway house televani the house of magic let's get back on track they got the most powerful mages and the coolest mushroom towers and they are very much um isolationist and they don't care about others and they'll even kind of do bad things to one another because of their whole belief system and their kind of motto yeah they're really like it's a real dog eat dog world it's like if you stole it and got away with it you deserve it if you if you beat him then obviously your argument has the better merit like it's really is sort of a like you deserve it if you get it basically if you were more cunning or you were more uh you know intelligent and you had the better plan or you know the more powerful magic um it's kind of a weird thing because it pits a lot of the house against one another but they they're kind of like the house delvani is kind of like uh it feels i guess even more like the you know we were saying like the thieves guild kind of feels like a a union rather than like a tight like belief kind of thing but they're all of these very isolationist individualistic majors that sort of benefit preserving those protections by being a house in a way it's almost like a dragon like mindset in the you know being the most powerful one being right you know being the most powerful is being right and you know in a sense you can kind of look at it like these are all very individualistic characters who care about their experiments and expanding their knowledge and they can benefit from having someone who they may hate in their own house who's also a genius and they kind of you know they're all um if they're advancing their studies of magic and science or whatever then you know it's i guess it's for the good of the race and the house and themselves yeah and i think you can't like it's just more incentive to be isolationist like if you are televani and you follow the whole wisdom confers power and power confers right ideology you go off to study i almost wouldn't want to live around lots of other powerful televani they might just kill me because they want to or because you know they see me as a threat like it's very you know there's not a lot of not a lot to be gained by being super social yeah in house televani it's worth noting that they're like the most uh like sort of secular they kind of don't really care about the tribunal like you won't find many religious sort of uh people like you know they might be like base level but you know what i mean they're not like you don't find zealots among le talvani typically and they they send their mouth to their meetings for them they can't be bothered yeah like they have um not not their actual mouth they have like a representative called the mouth yeah and it's cool and they've got so many eccentric characters like um oh my god i've completely one of the first one is a it's the it's the woman with the with the naked khajiit slave and all of the the gems aligned um i've forgotten her name but basically she's absolutely insane um dunmer woman powerful mage and then there's also exam like you know divet fear of course that he's cloned himself for like wife daughters and he's got like a dungeon which he tries to encourage thieves to go and steal from um but they can't you know they'll probably get killed like he's just got a like a bunch of different things going on and and like um yeah and darvathia is just really cool as a long-standing character there's plenty of ancient wizards here like you know because you know he's the oldest supposedly which is like over 4 000 years old at the time of morrowind so he was around even when they were kyma like he would have witnessed like physically witness being kyma turned into a donma and like experiencing that that would be crazy but i'm sure there are plenty of examples of like oh he's a thousand-year-old wizard oh he's a 2000 year old one you know no they are cool yeah that's that's one thing it's like you know you imagine their counselors meeting that they they would barely be able to agree with each other on anything so it's almost pointless them getting involved in the in the politics of the other great houses because they're never going to see eye to eye with anyone pretty much outside of their own tower they would be incredibly unlikable like you love them in the games because that's how like games and movies can feel like that where unlikable like as in if you lived in the world they'd be unlikable characters are really cool yeah but like if you actually had to meet and interact with them yeah like nelloth for example you'd be like ugh gross like using his own apprentices for bad experiments and like you know i'll teach you magic and then like doing dodgy stuff to him it's cool for a game yeah well you can imagine you know some of the other houses kind of suffer them because it's like if we really need them and we can actually get them to help us out with something you know like they lend their wisdom or their power you know for example stopping an enemy and they actually bother to help then it's like you know you've got this really powerful wild card except you know it's like you don't have the right gym badge so they don't obey you it's just you hope that they do the right thing to win you it's kind of like a reluctant like caught wizard that you just keep in the back pocket just in case you need him man i i really do like how like i think morrowind really did like the politics and stuff really well because there's so many like cross sections so you know how talvani they're all the isolationist kind of things but they're very staunch defenders of slavery which sort of makes them uh naturally more so allies to house dress and how stress is um you know their biggest uh offenders of slavery and they do um and they you know all of their sort of agriculture and stuff but then you've got that sort of cross section where dress are very very traditionalist which crosses with sort of interim which are very conserving orthodox and then you've got that which crosses with house veteran who are like quite you know pious family sort of stuff and that crosses with indril and there's i just there's a lot of like uh just you know interconnectedness you know what i mean like it's it's hard not to fall in love with the dunmer and morrowind above pretty much any other race in tamriel because it almost seems like the amount of complexity of the relationships between the provinces is pretty much on par with the complexity of just the powers and politics in morrowind itself you know it's so detailed in so many ways the um was it yeah i mean that's one of the best things about them is that not only are they you know when you die so there's some races that might look more plain but then you dive into them and you're like wow there's actually a lot more here than i thought and they're really cool morrowind uh sorry dark elves and morrowind in general kind of just win on all fronts because it's like not only is there a lot of complexity behind the scenes and in all the world building but they're also just really aesthetic and like cosmetically cool as well like you know we use magic to build mushroom towers and the only way you can get up is with levitation or you know this uh cheap press a in the dlc and just fly up there using whatever magical assistance that it has if you think about it too a lot of um the problem with a lot of other places is by comparison where they're just going to lose is they're either generally either a binary or or just a like a monopoly essentially like you know somerset is completely under the control without married dominion valenwood is kind of feels the same even like if it's not under the armory dominion there's just lots of tribes and stuff maybe that would be cool but like um you know if you were elsewhere elsewhere got like cut into two kingdoms where you've sort of got north first south in morrowind you've got sorry in skyrim you've got like east first west or storm close to the sempai whatever but basically conservatives progressive exact same thing with hammerfell you've got crowns and forebears it's just sort of the one or two whereas in in uh morrowind you've immediately got five different things all viking power and then within them they've got their own conflicts and then you've got the temple as well and then obviously because of the setting you have the empire's interests all stuff coming in as well and just this big inter-mixture of stuff so and the sixth house yeah exactly all kinds of stuff yeah well i guess let's uh we can touch on the sixth house a bit which is more or less like originally house degoth was was back when degoth uh was around with nerevar and stuff at the time like he was just another house of the kaima house but obviously as he was either killed because he was a baddie or betrayed or there's all the variations of battle at red mountain but basically he became sort of like the sharma dagother the false dreamer but basically the sixth house from that point onwards sort of became a a cult dedicated the way that you could frame it you know how we're using the biblical thing before um comparison you can kind of treat it as like if the shaman is there like satan you can imagine like the satanist cults that's kind of what the sixth house is to the dharma people it's like you know what i mean that's that's the kind of vibe like all pentagrams and stuff like that like that's the kind of vibes it gives them and that's kind of what they are like obviously um when de gother is sort of returning in more so full power during the time of the third era uh the sixth house is um expanding a lot and they're smuggling like these sort of like ash statues and stuff to and getting into people's dreams and spreading he's basically like his blight and his influence and and stuff like that but to be honest they are kind of the baddie devil satan cult house but they weren't originally it's just because their leader is the charmat i i like i like they have supposedly have this affinity for music and sound as well like they have all these bells and and chimes and stuff in their shrines which they use in rituals and because it's um pretty sure there's even a creature well what it is is when you go into elder scrolls so the um you know how the elder scrolls does music and stuff and visualizing on and you know there's a tonality like everything's a song yeah and the tonal architecture and the form and all of these things are sort of like musical oriented so it's sort of talking about the fabric of universe as musical you'll see the earliest sort of ash zombie minions they're like eye caves in kind of thing and then it caves in more and now you start getting like a tentacley looking um sort of thing coming out of it and then you as they you know grow and grow and grow they become the sleepers which are like you have more of those tentacles sort of all pooling out and they're long tentacles with like um like almost like a flute looking thing with like different eyes or whatever the instrument's called there's concept art there's really cool concept art of like this big kind of like trunk creature with all these musical notes yeah but it's like a reverse the sleepers it's like the reverse um enlightenment kind of kind of thing which is kind of on theme with with the sharmat which is the idea that he is he's like he dreams that he is real from the dreams like he's like awake in the dream this is all very contrived and hard to get around but it's basically that he um he he's in the dream sleeve dreaming himself into existence he's like awake in the dream sleeve whereas usually it's the reverse that might be in summary we're going to have to have a sixth house podcast eventually yeah that's because like perhaps what's crazy about those guys is it like the tribunal gods and all the battle red mountain and dagoth ur is that you can continuously change your understanding and think more and more and more about it and like different stuff it's so um i like imagining the kind of the way these cultists essentially following dagoff um become it's kind it's kind of like reminiscent of the actual the story of you know you've got the heart of lorcan which is kind of the constant beat that's going on that dagorfer is you know very closely tied to and you know obviously the the tour with kagrenax tools including um uh the hammer um what's that yeah yeah yeah and you know kind of like the idea is tapping the um the heart of lorcan to kind of sync yourself up with it and then you've got these chimes and the bell hammers that these cultists are using and you imagine they're all kind of syncing up and the magic is flowing the same way the black flows through morrowind you know it's like cleansing the land and all of this it's very cool but it gets very wacky yeah yeah no i like that sounds good it's definitely mad i um i don't know uh we you can touch us how sad dress but there's basically nothing to say outside of its mention that they replace house lalu i think that could even be uh a legends card i feel like i've seen a saddest agent but i mean you know it's a dunmer yeah it doesn't give you much it's a dunmer looking agent with a a blue sword the sword is quite interesting or is it something else or maybe that's their art of a bound sword kind of looks like chill rend with ethereal stuff around it i don't know but yeah saddras agent um also i guess uh we should bring this up and we've kind of brought it up a few other times in smaller parts but how the sort of house politics interact so the idea was in kaima times um pre-tribunal that well actually even a bit earlier but basically the idea was that there was all these houses that were in all out um war all the time like if you know if house rhetoric wasn't getting along with indril they'll just go to war and so on and that's where you get the unique function of the morag tong that gets implemented and so on which is sort of adding this sort of uh third party to be to mediate all of the violently mediate all of the grievances between houses and it actually um leads to a greater stability of um of morrowind because they i mean they've got two things going for them they've got three gods to tell them what to do so they've got to behave but then also it gives them a sort of like a catharsis or something that i can get that person murdered because i don't like it or whatnot you know yeah it's a weird dynamic when it's you know uh the maurik tong not just being a kind of oh you know there's there's more to them than just pay me and i kill this person it's you know um and you can imagine that that's kind of how it works it's like you know they're the great houses are kind of allowed to operate freely and but then when you know certain individuals start pissing off too many people like you know one branch of this big tree growing too um crazy then they'll just then finally the morag tong will come in and chop it off and kind of bring back a little bit of order but yeah it's a weird balance it is a weird too and i feel like it also like keeps them in um uh and more so like it creates a power balance by having this sort of powerful assassins third party that you can use to fight your opponents it's like basically a weapon that everyone can use so it's not like oh one has more military might so they'll win or whatnot and if you actually look into the fourth era house rhetorian the one with a lot of military might and and um a lot of power has sort of become the very dominant house of morrowind and sort of leading because there is no check and balance to um rhetorians power anymore so um you know interesting uh reasoning for it i don't know if i'd want to live in a society where the morang tong can shelf might stab me but yeah yeah anyway i guess that brings us to the end unless anyone has anything else to say it's been a a good podcast always nice to talk about morrowind yeah people keep asking one like we'll get to it there's a lot of we keep putting off because there's a few more like not even simple uh there's a few more like simply complex topics that we can talk about that aren't the ridiculous complexity of things like the 36 lessons of vivec people keep asking for us to break those down but like they're it's just a lot like it's almost like a video might be better to do that in or like i don't know but it might be fun to do it like live and so on and like break it down yeah probably yeah i feel like it would be pretty fun like as long as we have like a a good period of kind of like beforehand study yeah you know going all into it and like getting well prepared yeah but yeah i'd be down to go through them i think it'd be and then we can do you know the charm at six house kind of stuff kind of stuff yeah yeah yeah cool but yeah all right anyways thank you all for watching and our social media links are in the description and we look forward to nerding out with you all again very soon

Channel: FudgeMuppet

Views: 83,808

Keywords: skyrim, elder scrolls, elder scrolls lore, skyrim lore, elder scrolls podcast, fudgemuppet, elder scrolls lore podcast, elder scrolls 6

Id: mjgsDPziEyc

Length: 68min 58sec (4138 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021